Two Brothers, Two Coasts: Driving Vancouver to New York
The Disney-ification of Yellowstone National Park
From the moment you drive in, through the huge stone arch like something out of Jurrasic Park, you can see the Disney-ification of a natural treasure.
The irony of the sign on the arch was the first thing to grate on me. “For the benefit and enjoyment of the people” followed swiftly by a booth where you pay for a weekly ($25) or annual pass (are you insane?). At the campground you pay for boxes of firewood, the showers and you can even pay $1.40 for a “Campsite Reserved” sign for the plot you have already reserved online. Welcome to America.
As soon as you get in tourists get too close to dangerous wildlife and drive the main network of roads as if they are a monorail, phones stuck to the window capturing every second of the experience.
I walked into the Lake Hotel (I wanted to know if it had a bar) and the vast lobby, with a twinkling piano in the background, reminded me of the grand Disneyland Hotel itself.
OK, maybe I was in a bad mood from the start. Ted and I had just been well and truly spoiled by the Canadian national parks. The scenery, the people, even the quality of the campgrounds was better than what we encountered in Yellowstone. The weather wasn’t helping. It had poured with rain from the minute we drove in to the moment we left. This was in comparison to the frankly ridiculous weather we had in Canada for the last two weeks, never dropping below 22C and uninterrupted sunshine.
This was meant to be early in the season but tourists from all over were already stacking every lay-by, posing for photos near herds of bison pretending to stroke them, lasso them, or to be falling into a geyser. One guy was holding up a retractable sign saying “You Should Be Here” for a photo.
If this is Disneyland then Old Faithful is its Space Mountain.
Every road sign has a mile marker and direction to the old geyser. Which meant it was always going to be an anti-climax. The small opening is atop a mound surrounded by board walks of tourists. In a park of steaming holes in the ground, it is one amongst many. We walked through the visitor centre and realised that this was a place countless unhappy schoolchildren (geography nerds excluded) had been herded around year after year.
On the way to Old Faithful we stopped at the Midway Geyser Basin, where we walked a marked trail of geysers, paint pots, where water boils and spews aggressively from the ground and clay bubbles rotate and pop amongst clouds of steam. To be fair some parts of Yellowstone National Park are like the surface of another planet, it’s just not one I want to live on.
